After Hurricane Sandy, many Staten Islanders looked at the project of rebuilding neighborhoods of wrecked homes and realized it was simply too big for an individual, and maybe even a government, to handle — and wondered when nonprofit groups would start assisting New Yorkers.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a slew of nonprofit organizations lent a hand or a hammer — and some continue to this day, more than seven years later — to help people find a place to live. Some of those organizations have already started reaching out to see how they can bring their experience to Staten Island.

“There’s no reason why we should keep what we do in this little pocket of New Orleans,” Adrian Kohn, associate director of development for St. Bernard Project, said as he stood outside a home under construction in St. Bernard Parish.

St. Bernard Project began in 2006 as an effort to help residents in Louisiana — particularly in St. Bernard, a neighborhood just outside of New Orleans — get back into their homes.

Since then, they’ve branched out to helping other disaster areas, but their work in New Orleans still isn’t done, even more than seven years after Katrina. The organization is also working in Joplin, Mo., the site of devastating tornadoes last year, and has already sent volunteers to New York City in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

“Essentially, SBP has rebuilt more homes in New Orleans with less money and fewer volunteers than any other organization,” Kohn explained.

SBP also provides well-paying jobs for locals and under- or unemployed veterans. But its “vertically integrated construction” model makes tremendous use of volunteers, allowing the agency to have 30 to 40 sites operating on a daily basis around New Orleans, St. Bernard and the region. 

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They’ve been working with the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation, as well as New York Cares and We Build New York, to figure out how they can best serve displaced New Yorkers.

“One way we can help is becoming the building partners of these organizations,” Kohn said.

The SBP model makes use of a small paid staff, another 130 Americorps members working for SBP in Louisiana and in Joplin, and a slew of rotating volunteers from around the country who help build homes.

A few weeks ago, a crew of girls from Convent of the Sacred Heart School in Greenwich, Conn., were painting walls and doors in the sun outside a two-story home on a residential street in the Chalmette neighborhood of St. Bernard. Many of the surrounding homes were occupied — but others remained as empty as their owners left them after Katrina. Still others were demolished, leaving empty lots in their place.

The homeowner had taken one hit after another, said Larson Weinstein, 24, the Americorps site supervisor for the project. After losing her home to Katrina — the entire area was under water for weeks —the grandmother of 12 was ripped off by her contractor. Then, her home was damaged yet again by Hurricane Isaac.

“It’s an example of a house that was done wrong,” Weinstein said. SBP has helped plenty of people rebuild a second time after contractor fraud, he said. “It seems that down here, it was, you could get a hammer, then you could get money.”

It’s a fear many Islanders might have as they rebuild — the home would appear complete to someone who didn’t know much about building.

But there was myriad of problems. The heating and ventilation ducts were the wrong size. The roof needed repair, and water getting inside it during Isaac caused the upstairs window frames to sag. The contractor had put the wrong kind of drywall in bathrooms and the laundry room — the moisture in those rooms would have rotted the walls in five or six years. The crew from SBP had to completely gut the home.

“For the first three weeks here it was one step forward and three steps back,” Weinstein said. “It’s just horrifying to think contractors can sleep at night knowing they’re doing this.”

As he painted and installed appliances and doors, he was assisted by volunteers like Julia Perry, 16, of Westchester.

“Living in New York, you don’t really experience a lot of these kinds of natural disasters. But we just did,” Miss Perry said. “I just wanna help as much as I can. I think New York will learn from everything they’ve done down here.”

Like many people working in Louisiana after Katrina, Weinstein, too, isn’t from the area — he’s from Annapolis, Md. But like many who came after the storm, he wants to make the region his home.

“While there aren’t as many volunteers as there were right after [Katrina], the clients we have now, their problems are so much deeper, because they’ve been homeless for almost 8 years,” Weinstein said with a pause. “Think about that. Seven years, in the United States of America. It’s not acceptable.”

HABITAT FOR HUMANITY

Among one of the most famous post-Katrina housing endeavors is the Habitat for Humanity Musicians’ Village.

The development includes 72 single-family homes, all brightly painted and elevated off the ground, with pretty front porches and yards neatly manicured by their homeowners. There are also five senior-friendly duplex homes, a park, and the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music, which Michele Jean-Pierre, the executive director of the center, showed off to City Councilmen James Oddo (R-Mid-Island) and Vincent Ignizio (R-South Shore), along with Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway on their trip to the city.

There’s a theater with perfect acoustics where greats of the New Orleans music scene have played; there’s classrooms with computers or where kids can learn to dance or play instruments. There’s a lounge named after Dave Matthews, one of the project’s big supporters.

Jesse Moore, a Brooklyn-born actor and musician, said he bought the very last house in Musicians Village. He had been living in New Orleans for several years and had settled in the French Quarter when Katrina struck.

“After the storm I stuck around for a couple of years. I was living in the Quarter and I was going crazy,” Moore recalled. “It was like Dresden.”

So he left town to tour as a musician, and tried living in Austin. But one night, he looked out the window and knew he had to go “home” — to New Orleans. He was couch surfing and found himself living two blocks away from where they signed up prospective homeowners for Musicians Village — and the new home was like a godsend.

His bright, pretty home featured plants decorating the porch, and guests are asked to take their shoes off inside. He upgraded the floors after moving in. Moore feels safe from future storms in the home — which he said is also very energy-efficient.

“This area took three feet of water. They built this to five feet,” Moore said. “All you need is an inch of water and your house is wrecked.”

The neat little rows of houses, inhabited by musicians and artists, are helping the surrounding area, Moore said.

“There’s a resurgence in this community,” he said. “It’s gentrifying. It’s one of the last places you can buy an old house and fix it up.”

But it’s easy to forget, sometimes, just how bad things can be right outside their colorful little village and its surrounding blocks, Moore said. “It’s still dangerous,” he said.

Moore said he felt for New Yorkers — his sister once owned a home on Staten Island — when he saw the footage of Hurricane Sandy. And like many in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, he was outraged at the idea that any of their local lawmakers wouldn’t support federal Sandy relief.

Many in New Orleans expressed that sympathy and empathy for New Yorkers — and Mike Flores, board president of New Orleans Habitat for Humanity, recalled all New York did for New Orleans.

“The first walls were built in Rockefeller Center,” Flores said of the homes in Musicians’ Village, which were put together on the “Today” show and shipped down south by fire crews.

He remembered the tears or joy and thanks of the people in New Orleans when that happened.

“Whatever you guys need,” he promised, a common sentiment from those who had seen disaster before in their own backyard.

SPECIAL REPORTSANDY's AFTERMATH

Reporter Jillian
Jorgensen visited New Orleans to look at its response to Hurricane
Katrina. This series aims to help Staten Island recover from Hurricane
Sandy bylearning the lessons of a city that faced many of the same challenges.